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Faith, Doing Good, and Voting pt 2

Voting is an act of faith. That’s my point. I started writing about this a few posts ago, and you can see that it the Previous Addresses to the right. Whatever your faith–and I’m thinking in terms of some kind of real, religious, spiritual, or otherwise related-to-those-words kind of faith–you exercise it, express it, and practice it when you vote. Not that the gesture of voting proves that you have faith or doesn’t. But that voting, when you do it, is an act of faith.

Faith comes from the unseen, though it is tutored by what is seen. To vote is similar. You choose or select and give your support to a person based upon something that can’t be seen. So it’s an act of faith.

Lately, I’m thinking of voting as a chance for believing people, if you will, to think and to act upon their best thoughts. As a leader, I see a part of my role in people’s lives as enabling people to make the best choices. As a Christian leader, I don’t separate those choices from faith in Christ. Christ is foundational, in my view and life and work, when it comes to good choices.

Leaders sometimes tell people what to do or what not to do. Leaders also present people with their options and make connections between those options and what those folks value. I think helping people see voting as “an expression of your best options” is a good thing. Why wouldn’t I push people to do good at every possible time, at any available chance? It’s not at all that voting is the only chance to live into your faith, to make visible your belief, but it is one such chance. Making faith real and tangible requires using every option, including voting.

That’s what makes voting, the small and non-ultimate act that it is, a critical one. It adds itself on top of the rest of what a person does when doing good. Voting becomes a part of that person’s life as he or she lives toward the good. I have no delusions that voting is indispensable to a healthy life. To think that would suggest blindness of several levels. But I do think that the expression of the civic gesture is one more way to make tangible the desire to do good.

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"We write because language is the way we keep a hold on life. With words we experience our deepest understandings of what it means to be intimate." --bell hooks in a book about writing.

"...the artist must bow to the monitor of his own imagination; must be led by the sovereignty of his own impressions and perceptions; must be guided by the tyranny of what troubles and concerns him personally..." --Richard Wright in a letter to Antonio Frasconi

"I mean the common run of us who love magnificence, beauty, poetry and color so much that there can never be too much of it. Who do not feel that the ridiculous has been achieved when some one decorates a decoration. That is my viewpoint. I see a preacher as a man outside of the pulpit and so far as I am concerned he should be to follow his bent as other men." --Zora Neale Hurston writing to James Weldon Johnson

"But that is the rub from any angle--getting the chance." --Claude McKay

"I am in between. Trying to write to be understood by those who matter to me, yet also trying to push my mind with ideas beyond the everyday. It’s a purgatory I inhabit. Not quite here nor there. On good days I feel I am a bridge. On bad days I just feel alone."
--Sergio Troncoso